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Seriously, These Art Pieces Are Garbage

Swedish artist Vincent Skoglund doesn't sculpt with bronze he clay. He works with trash.

His graffiti-like process includes finding discarded objects, assembling them on the spot, and photographing the composite.

“I’d rather spend any day walking around in a dump than in a shopping mall,” the Swedish artist says. “New stuff often bores me.”

A piece made from carpets.

This one is all wood shelving.

A sculpture of radiators.

Not all pieces are so stringently themed. This one is chipboard and apples.

Humans generate a lot of waste, but we're especially dismissive of old technology. This one is of computer parts and bulbs.

A simpler piece, from an old boat and nets.

Construction materials like metal sheets, and corrugated metal.

Styrofoam and rebar.

This one is thrown out tricycles and Petrol cans.

Probably the simplest one, made from bricks.

Old doors.

Exhausts, and a safety belt.

As Vincent Skoglund sees it, there are two sides to consumerism: There’s the shiny in-store experience, where shelves and racks of mint-condition products await purchase and a new home. And there’s the afterlife, where all those once-new objects get discarded and hauled off to landfills. Skoglund prefers the latter. “I’d rather spend any day walking around in a dump than in a shopping mall,” the Swedish artist says. “New stuff often bores me.”

Skoglund is a dumpster diver, but instead of fishing for food or making a political statement, he’s scouting for pieces to include in his architectural sculpture series, Waste Management. For each piece, Skoglund scours dumpsters and roadside piles for bulky items. He has a magpie process, a bit similar to making graffiti: He improvises as he assembles these monolithic, orderly pieces on site, and then photographs them. Also, like graffiti, the work is ephemeral, made of objects that will get carted off to landfills, “things that inevitably will be shredded and buried away, burned, made into new raw materials, or simply left in nature,” he says. “I let them live a little bit longer by documenting the bits and pieces in a new context.”

Oddly enough, Skoglund’s inspiration for the composites comes from his background as a snowboarding enthusiast in the Swedish countryside. He spent 15 years traveling with the intent of photographing snowboarders in action, but ultimately spent a lot of his time building huge jumps on slopes, to make the sport more interesting. After years of scouting for new ways to interpret the landscape, his eyes seem trained to do that anywhere.

That’s the genesis of Waste Management, but it's not really the project's final effect. Instead, it’s hard to scan through Skoglund’s photographs and not reflect on the colossal amount of junk we create. Waste is inevitable, but when it comes to technology we’re especially dismissive of old pieces of hardware. It’s a societal behavior pattern that’s jumpstarted some ambitious, big-picture-thinking projects of late, from Ara, Google’s modular phone concept, to BlueOak Resources, a company that's mining old electronics to flip them into gold. Skoglund’s implied goal is more modest: It’s a visual cue to get people to think about products, and to simply wonder, “where do they go after we dispose of them?”